Second World War

Always, it was found in seeps. Even until a few years after the Second World War, all Iranian oil fields were associated with surface seeps. The first well in Texas-1865-was drilled near a seep. A well in Ontario had been drilled six years earlier, and in the same summer the first commercial oil well in the United States was drilled in Pennsylvania by Colonel Edwin Drake-less than a hundred steps from Oil Creek. Colonel Drake had no record of co-working space haarlem military service. He was a sick railroad conductor-forty years old but debilitated, too fragile to remain upright in the lurching aisles of the New York & New Haven. To the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company of Connecticut, which had bought farmland and timberland along Oil Creek, he had committed his life savings. Drake was not a geologist. He did not know that petroleum is primarily the remains of marine algae that pile up dead on the floors of shallow seas in situations that prevent oxidation. He did not know that the algal corpses slowly stew for millions of years at temperatures just high enough to crack them into crude. He did not know that oil forms in one kind of rock and moves into another-forms in, say, the lagoonal muds of epicontinental seas, and moves later into the sandstones that were once the barrier beaches between the lagoons and the open sea. He did not know that Oil Creek had cut down through Pennsylvanian and Mississippian formations and on into a Devonian coast. Drake knew none of this in i859, and neither did the science of geology. What Drake did know was that there was negotiability in the stuff that was dripping into Oil Creek. It was even used as medicine. Fleets of red wagons co-working space breda had been all over eastern America selling seepage as a health-enhancing drink. “Kier’s Genuine Petroleum! Or Rock Oil! A natural remedy . . . possessing wonderful curative powers in diseases of the Chest, Windpipe and Lungs, also for the care of Diarrhea, Cholera, Piles, Rheumatism, Gout, Asthma, Bronchitis, Scrofula, or King’s Evil; Burns and Scalds, Neuralgia, Tetter, Ringworm, obstinate eruptions of the skin, Blotches and Pimples on the face, biles, deafness, chronic sore eyes, erysipelas …”